La Vita Nuova

I've moved. Apologies for the lack of attention, but I've moved. It was a nightmarish move and we're now living out of boxes, except in the kitchen, where it really counts. But the place is beautiful. So beautiful that I had to drive out a family of racoons, a little too harshly. They're safe and sound now but will tell generations-long stories of the monster in the round hole that dropped into eternity. It was harsh. More on that later.
Also, I missed the promised banjo gig with Deb Hay at Passe Muraille. She knew I wasn't coming though. I wasn't as bad as that. I wonder how it went?

Brer Zoilus

Carl has weighed in thoroughly on the subject of The Subject of Minstrelsy in Current Music Crit thinking, quoting my recent post unnecessarily, because he is my friend. Among other hypotheses, he puts forward the intellectually satisfying idea that the discussion may have arisen as a natural evolution away from the Cultural Appropriation debates of the Eighties. And he speculates that the next wave will analyze the roots and the roots and the roots and the roots of these roots of American music.

Roots of roots got me thinking of what Robert Hemenway said about Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit in his introduction to the Penguin Classics Edition. Uncle Remus, Harris' invention, might have been as white as Harris was, and very much a product of the times, but Brer Rabbit is an altogether older figure:

A fictional character, Uncle Remus was created by an author with a sentimental attachment to a plantation memory. Bald, bearded, bespectacled, Remus is a former slave who does odd jobs around the plantation after emancipation. He tells his stories night after night to a little white boy, son of the plantation owner, unfolding to him in grandfatherly fashion the "mysteries of plantation lore." Remus has, Harris tells us, "nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery." This fictional creation of a white Southerner was welcomed by an audience that wanted to believe Remus was a representative of his race; Uncle Remus is a cousin of those 19th Century minstrels who blackeded their faces to entertain with jokes and songs. He is, in a way, white.
Brer Rabbit, on the other hand... had been a staple of Afro-American folk expression prior to 1880... Shaped by a long line of oral artists. Brer Rabbit is black from the tip of his ears to the fuzz of his tail, and he defeats his enemies with a superior intelligence growing from a total understanding of his hostile environment. He is the brier-patch representative of a people living by their wits to make a way out of no way.
These two images, Uncle Remus's semiminstrelsy and Brer Rabbit's cunning tricksterism, complicate the interchange between tale and teller in Harris's famous book. Uncle Remus is literature, artifice, a Victorian relic whose plantation manners embarrass the modern reader. Brer Rabbit is folklore, a communally created universal outlaw whose revolutionary antics satisfy deep human needs. Joel Chadler Harris works between the two of them, investing a part of himself in Uncle Remus, struggling to understand Brer Rabbit's appeal.

Now, I always feel a little uneasy writing about this stuff, because I have a hard time distinguishing between objective analysis and more emotional (reactionary?) content. Hemenway wrote that essay in 1982. Can you tell? It's the appropriation-discussion decade. So is there any chiding in it? Is it claiming that Brer Rabbit is more authentic than Uncle Remus? Or merely older? I can't figure it out.

I'm wondering about this because I posted earlier of my admiration for Michelle Shocked having the desire to put the image out there of herself in blackface. This was in 1992, just a year before Eric Lott came out with his seminal Love and Theft. I guess there was something in the air, which is why Carl's idea connecting it to the post-appropriation decade is so satisfying to me.

After posting though, and with an ass-backwards way of doing things, I decided to make sure I had my Shocked facts straight. I discovered almost immediately that she gets chided (by Mark Deming) in this little capsule for wading into the debate without any real understanding of it. That got me wondering whether I was wading into the debate w/o having any understanding of it. Because, as I see it, Michelle was making a direct expression of her own Love for the form and a simple acknowledgement of the Theft. Or, rather, she was failing to do this, proving that while talk on the subject is maybe okay, action is maybe (maybilly?) not. Illustrations are acceptible if over a century old. Otherwise problematic.

Shocked may not have had the critical faculties to finess her desire into words (or even to get her collection of favourite songs produced with the raw sound that might have gotten it embraced as an early alt-country effort, like her own earlier Texas Campfire Takes), but her desire to use her own face to express that old American cultural collision was intuitively right on. Admirable, as far as I'm concerned.

Again, I'm embarrassed about this, b/c I feel like I'm entering an argument long since resolved, long since forgotten. But here I am! I have a voice! Hear me roar! Etcetera! Or (as my Microsoft Word Dictionary would have it) Etceteras!

I have a gig

Or at least I should have a gig, on the 29th of April, backing up Deb Hay for a few songs during her gig at Theatre Passe Muraille. Mostly just very mild and humble support. BUT it's also the day that we move into our new house, at 9 a.m. that morning, so I guess, if there are disasters, there's a chance that I won't make it. But I'm practising. I'm practising. And Deb has a lovely voice, so perhaps you should check it out anyway. There are songs in there that'll make the most jaded actor-type weep. 9 p.m. 15 dollars. 16 Ryerson Ave, Toronto. Box Office 416.504.7529.

Her primary back-up (I'm a guest) features Kevin Quain, Jack Nicholsen and Rachel Melas. She writes that Ed Sullivan is coming.�And Viggo Mortenson is coming. So...

And Tonight I'll be playing on a front porch on Oxford Street, helping Camille Stubel say farewell to the house that has been her home for the last ten years or so, with the assistance of Matthew Payne, Corin Raymond, someone who's email monicker is the real blue duck, and Raghu Lokanathan who used to live there. I don't really have the moral authority to invite you, but drop by if you're in the neighbourhood.

Spring is here. It's time to learn how to play the banjo again.

Robert Crumb

... plays the banjo. A 4-string.

Left Coast Minstrel Jaw

Great post from Zoilus about the Seattle Pop Conference, specifically an intense session on the Minstrel Period, featuring a bunch of the major players. Mr. Lee Henderson asks in Zoilus' Comments section why there's all this buzz these days about the Minstrels. I wonder if it has anything to to with that other conference last week. Certainly there's been a lot of excellent scholarly writing on the subject in recent years. Perhaps it's just time. Nuff water under the bridge. Far enough in the past to do more good than harm by talking about it. Or in the words of Daddy Rice's braver-than-Othello Otello:

More could Iago chat,
If he'd but let de bag out of de cat

But mostly because American musical culture has always been a culture of collision and fusion between black and white. Blackface is one of the hard bits of evidence of that. So's the banjo. So's jazz. So's all of it. It's never been the fashion to write about it. In fact it's anti-fashion, anti-trend, and some of it's very ugly. It's just a truth that's always been hard to talk about.



Like when Michelle Shocked tried to wear blackface for the cover of her Arkansas Traveler album. You'll note that was years ago. 1992. She wasn't permitted. The label put a cheesy semi-cartoon pic on the cover instead, of Michelle with her bare-feet in a bucket, clutching a waltzing-matilda. Though they did allow the flip side of the equation: giving her a pretty, grand-ole oprey style photo of a smiling white girl in a straw hat and calico skirt on the back. They allowed the historical white but not its mirror image. They didn't want to offend anybody, though Michelle's intent was less to shock and more to pay homage and force her audience to remember where all this music really came from in the first place.

It's not easy though to pay homage to a culture that easily finds the homage itself offensive. Easily and understandably. I might be able to appreciate Buster Keaton's sly commentary on US racism (not to mention the blackface tradition) in his short Neighbours, when he shows himself getting dragged away by the police after falling face-first in the mud, to the enjoyment of his black neighbour; but then later, after he's escaped and gotten himself cleaned up, it's the neighbour who's taken instead. What's being commented on here? The neighbour's alleged mud-coloured mug or the lawman's blindness? The question itself is not pleasant. I might appreciate what looks like an accurate depiction of American culture, but not everybody's going to. That's just a fact. The African American response to blackface is more cutting, like this and this.

And also this:



"My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I'm gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?"
(from 'Cross' by Langston Hughes)

It seems though that that's what Daddy Rice himself was doing in the first place. Paying homage to a creole culture, in the 1830's, with his plays. He was more like Emenem than his later imitator/inverters. Lahmon writes:

This creolized street talk stages and speaks for the transracial public Rice has been organizing... The disdain he suffers on the boards is the contempt a good part of his audience endures offstage... Rice is deploying rather than enjoying the social hurt.

But then:

Circus entrepreneurs were learning to merge the newly robust racism gelling in society with some conventions from blackface performance and present them in theatres as the quite distinct minstrel show. This new form of blackface, conventionally dated as beginning during the winter of 1842, inverted Rice's positive connections to "blackness" and made them abhorrent.

But it's hard to see back to Daddy Rice's "positive connections to blackness." Esp. since later the name "Jim Crow" became associated with brutally repressive laws in the south.

In any case, yes Carl, I should've been there.

Ballooning in the 1830's

Daddy Rice is said to have peppered his performances with references to local culture wherever he was playing, but Lhamon points out how he takes elements from the larger culture and puts them to use in his plays. Ginger Blue in VIRGINIA MUMMY had a real mummy in the British Museum named after him. And in BONE SQUASH DIAVOLO, the title character makes his escape from the devil at the end in a hot air balloon. Ballooning was a phenomenon in the 1830's, although in those days they didn't do much more than go up and down at country fairs and carnavals. The great age didn't start, it seems, until 1836 and beyond, although for years there had already been expressed concern among warmongering circles that Britain was vulnerable to attack by balloon from mainland Europe. I've seen an illustration of such a speculative attack, inside a book about the naming of clouds (cumulus, cumulonimbus, etc. all quietly monickered by an English amateur named Luke Howard), but I've been unable to find it online.



This is the best I can do, although it's actually a celebration in Paris. Perhaps a Victory celebration? And this:



Oh wait. Here it is. I see now that it doesn't represent speculation in England. It represents speculation in France.

John Wise was a notable early pioneer, who dropped his cat from a church steeple attached to a parachute and watched it land safely, later made his first ascent in 1835, later invented the rip cord, later made the first air mail flight, later died in a fiery crash into Lake Michigan in 1879, where he remains to this day with the shell of his balloon.

Here are some more illustrations, mostly satirical, of the ballooning obsession of the 19th Century. And here's a picture of the landing after the very first goose-laden ascent.

Banjo Banjar apologizes for the disparate nature of these notes. That's the way things get assembled in a jar.

But for those who think banjos and balloon have nothing in common (aside from their appearance in the pre-Minstrel plays of Daddy Rice), I offer this little reminder:

Felicitations

Photo of Cheick Hamala Diabate by Rhiannon Giddens from the site.

... and congratulations on the great success and successful conclusion of the Black Banjo Then & Now Gathering in Boone, North Carolina, which finished up this last Sunday. The media launch of this event a couple of months ago was a primary inspiration for the starting of this blog.

Here's a quote from Tony Thomas, one of the organizers, from the Forum, reprinted without permission b/c I like it so much and am too shy to ask:

"I dont believe that young people are best approached by dumbing down, or mixing up traditions. I think they are best included by realizing the continuing of tradition and what one form provides for another. I don't think young people need to be won by hip hop on the banjo, since hip hop has developed its own instrumentation to do its work. However, I do think banjoists need to understand that Hip Hop is part of the tradition, the same tradition that Joe Thompson is part of, the same rhythms that Sule was teaching you all, and the same discourse that the blues, the blues ballads, the dance calling songs, are. When folks see vice versa then the links wills will be made."

Check out the line-up they had. And for a sample of the ngoni music of Cheik Hamala Diabate (pictured above), follow the link on his name above (below the pic) or go to this site (Bob Carlin's) and scroll down.

Actually, forget about the Bob Carlin link. It's piddly. The one above, 4 videos from from the Kennedy Centre, is lengthy and amazing, and features video as well as audio, so you can have a look at these remarkable instruments.

Mummies in the 1830's

A somewhat left-field subject for the 'jar, I know. But here it is: The presence of Egyptian mummies in popular entertainment goes all the way back to the 1830's and before, says W.T. Lhamon in his introduction to the Daddy Rice play, VIRGINIA MUMMY (collected in his book, Jump Jim Crow.) There were 'doctors' who used to go around unwrapping them in public, a process that wasn't quite as easy as it might seem, requiring 'levers' in one report.

And below is an 1835 apothecary receipt from New Market, Virginia, for various supplies and medications, including 1 oz Mummy...  Medicinal mummy dust, supposedly from pulverized Egyptian mummies, was thought to be a medical tonic, revitalizer, and useful against contusions. From this site.



Lhamon suggests that Rice took advantage of the new Western obsession with Mummies in the creation of his 1835 Virginia Mummy play. He describes the plot as follows:

A scientist, Dr. Galen, bans a young souldier, Captain Rifle, from courting the scientist's ward. When Rifle sees Galen's newspaper advertisement for a mummy, the soldier hires a voluble black hotel waiter, Ginger Blue, to hold his tongue and dress as a decoy. Rifle masquerades as the mummy's Egyptian owner: in that way they penetrate the household so that Rifle can court young Lucy, the ward. Rifle and Lucy immediately cavort offstage, leaving Ginger Blue centred on stage with his multiple masks and disguises to adopt, adapt, and shuck as necessary. The differences between VIRGINIA MUMMY and [the play from which it was adapted], then, stemmed from Virginia Blue's blackness: his sly assessments of leverage, nimble defences, and winning aggressions.



We're also told that this was a popular and longlasting play, and that it was picked up by other performers, the most notable being the famous British Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge (above.) Perhaps then this odd notion of the black man bound like a mummy in white society was a resonant one for Aldridge. Or for his white audiences anyway.

Sostenuto

Perhaps the zither-banjo is for me after all. That somewhat-longwinded definition of the ZB mentions in passing that "the instrument was particularly suited for the slower type of solo where sostenuto could be employed." I had never heard of this word 'sostenuto', but it sure sounded like the way I play, so I got very excited and looked it up. Webster's online dictionary defines it as

"sustained... applied to a passage the tones of which are to be somewhat prolonged or protacted.."

I don't know what that sounds like to you but it sounds to me like the clawhammer stylings of a semi-amateur. I've always maintained that we semi-able have an advantage over consummate musical professionals in our potential to wring every ounce of beauty out of the simplest series of notes, even out of a single note. We bring Sostenuto to our every performance.

Not Banjo-Zithers but...

I'd seen them in pawn shops and the occasional music story. I saw one in a shop in Perth, Australia and figured somebody had decided to build a banjo from seeing one once in a picture, decades earlier. I didn't notice that the ones I saw shared common features. Had no idea they'd once been considered a superior design of banjo. I always thought they were made by people who just didn't know what they were doing, primarily because they always featured a six-peg peghead for a five-string instrument.

(Mind you, there was always this sophisticated re-routing of the 5th-string up through the inside of the neck to pop out in the peghead so it could be looped with the rest of the strings, instead of having to dig a hole in the side of the neck for the 5th string peg, but I was still flummoxed by that unnecessary 6th peg.)

Turns out the 6th peg was included to provide symmetry, as in the picture below. Nobody wanted a peghead with three pegs on one side and two on the other. Or two on each side plus one lonely stub halfway down the neck. Perhaps that isolated peg reminded the banjo-plucking sailors of the unpleasant possibility of being alone in a lifesbuoy, bobbing up and down on the high seas...



Here's a fansite, including an essay-length answer to the immortal question, What is a Zither-Banjo? It also addresses the fascinating question of the split second-fret, another unique feature of the instrument.

And here's a definition from a brief UK Banjo dictionary that is itself worth a look, if only to tell you the difference between a zither-banjo and a banjo-zither, though there are other things there that you might need to know.

"The zither banjo became popular towards the end of the 19th century. Usually 5 string (often with 6 tuners). Typically  featuring an a wooden resonator encompassing a cast metal pot, and no perch pole. The 5th string usually was diverted through a metal tube under the fret board from the 5th fret to the tuning head. Considered a superior design of banjo at the time. Examples of 6 string, 7 string, tenor and mandolin banjo also made."

In Other News

Zoilus just broke his blogging fast to post about Veda Hille's new album. Hurrah!

(This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender)

Image by Curtis Broadway.

I've often considered stealing the motto of Pete Seeger - our only banjo superhero - which he's got written around the round edge of his banjo skin, for the byline of my blog. But for that I would have to emulate my wife and become more actively politically-minded.

So: A couple of tenuously banjo-connected bits out there, but hopefully the first will justify the presence of the second in my blog. You be the judge:

The first is from fellow banjo blogger Patrick Costello from Maryland, who's just discovered, nicely, that I'm a playwright. And then I helped inspire a contest on his site.

And the second baby-steps bit is from a new Toronto Political Theatre Blog called The Wrecking Ball, to which I've contributed, perhaps somewhat too briefly, about a great reckoning in a little country, the Philippines, subject of my wife's award-winning film, Seeing Is Believing.

Preoccupied

A little busy with renovations to be thinking about the 'jar. Back at it soon.